


Folie à Trois

by beaubete



Category: The Hour
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:37:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bel asks, and so she comes.  Of course she does; how could she do anything but?  She’s angry, but she’s still his wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Folie à Trois

Bel asks, and so she comes.  Of course she does; how could she do anything but?  She’s angry, but she’s still his wife.  And Freddie’s face is swollen, a mess, a pile of bruises and angry lines of stitches trooping across his face beneath the tubes.  Tubes for fluids, yellow and red with plasma and blood, tubes for food, because he hasn’t woken since he lay weeping on the grass at the Lime Grove, tubes for air when the swelling gets bad enough, and that’s the one that actually scares her—the thought he might die is nothing to the thought that he can’t control his own muscles, can’t make himself breathe past the hurt and the damage of their fists on his body.  The doctors say he’s probably okay—and Bel’s hands shake and Lix translates the parts that are hard for Camille to understand, but Camille stands straight-backed and nods sharp and Bel hears her _crying_ through the privacy curtain when she comes back with tea, and oh, none of this was supposed to go this way—his brain’s not swelling too much, of course it’s swelling, there’s not a part of him that’s not, and they’d had to cut his father’s ring from his finger when he’d first been admitted, but it’s not _too much_ , and he’s probably okay.  It’s just.  This sleep.  It’s just because his brain can’t handle the pain he’s in, can’t cope with it, and so it sleeps until it’s manageable again.

And Bel wishes she had the luxury, then hates herself for wishing.  She can’t leave, even with Camille there; she’s tried, gone home and kicked off her shoes and sank into the cushions on her couch with something like relief and fallen asleep on the spot, exhausted and tear-streaked and broken-hearted, only to jerk awake at three in the morning, frantic that he’d died and no one had told her.  She must have looked a mess—the cabbie had driven her double-speed when she’d asked to go to the hospital, and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him it wasn’t an emergency, no, he’d been in the little sterile room for a week and a half now, and even now his wife was holding his hand as he slept peacefully—and Camille had let her in without a word, just sat on the bad side of the bed and stroked his hand and pretended Bel wasn’t smudging his bedsheets with the remnants of yesterday’s makeup and devastated, broken tears.

“How did you meet?” she asks, finally, because she wants to know.

“How did you?” Camille rejoins.  “He walked into the club.  He laughed.  He told jokes—he spoke the worst French I’ve ever heard—he drank too much.  I loved him the moment I saw him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be.”

“We were fresh fish together,” Bel offers.  A peace offering.  “ Just left school; he filed the tapes and I poured tea and let the man on the financial desk pat me on the bum because I knew I’d be fired if I didn’t.  Freddie hated it.  He would sneak me into the room with him, and within a month no one had any tea but the tapes were organized flawlessly.  He’d splice the leftovers from the reels and we’d steal away a camera, shoot a minute at a time about our glorious future lives at the BBC.  We wrote our manifesto and imagined what it would be like to be real reporters.”

“Daydreamers,” Camille suggests.

“Dreaming,” Bel agrees.

“You loved him the moment you saw him.”

“Not at all.”

“You love him now.”

Bel looks away.

The nurses don’t know which of them is his wife.  Miss Rowley, Mrs. Lyon, Misses Lyon, Miss Mettier; Janice, the industrious housekeeper with an enormous bosom calls them “his ladies” and it’s Camille who breaks into hushed giggles when Janice leaves, pressing her forehead to his arm as her shoulders shake.  It takes a moment for Bel’s stunned silence to crack and then they’re laughing, both of them, clinging to his hands as if they can drag him up from the bed and from the depths of his sleep; Camille gives her a fond grin and reaches up to smooth his sweaty curls. 

“We are, you know.  His ladies,” she says.  Bel can’t swallow around the lump in her throat.

“We are.”

Freddie wakes on a Tuesday.

She’s running to the end of Mr. Brown’s patience.  He’s been kind—she only has to check in by phone most days, stop in for the weekly meeting on Mondays if she thinks she can make it—and she’s taken advantage, but Freddie being awake leaves her spinning her wheels.  She can’t stay in the room with Freddie, with Camille, with the thousands of unspoken apologies between them and the wordless way he holds their hands, as if he cannot possibly choose and does not understand why he must; she can’t fend off the silent words in his eyes as he pleads with her to say this thing between them or come back again with tea to whispers and the near-silent press of lips and pretend to be louder and clumsier, kicking the door just to see their shadows jump apart through the curtain.  She shrugs on her coat, kisses his brow.

“Money—” he says, and she smiles, adjusts her collar.

“Not all of us can be lie-abeds, Freddie.  Some of us have work to do.” 

She leaves, listens at the door for the whispers to start again, and is useless all day at work, then up half the night pacing.  Her flat is too large, suddenly, when it has always been so small before.  It’s too quiet, no murmured conversations in a heavy French accent coaxing the distant past from her memory.  She feels lonely, she realizes, fantasizes about visiting them in the hospital and thinks that she’d be visiting Camille as much as Freddie.  In the morning she lies in, as dizzy with lack of sleep as if she were hungover, calls in to the office and begs another day to the sound of Mr. Brown’s distinct disapproval, stops off at the flower stall on her way to the hospital and thinks better of it.  She puts the flowers in a vase on her desk  and ignores Lix’s raised eyebrow, bumbles around the office trying to look like she’s working on something and finds herself in the tape room, Freddie’s familiar handwriting mixed with Isaac’s, with Sissy’s on the labels.  She goes home, drinks half a bottle of wine without a glass, and still doesn’t sleep.

She doesn’t bother calling in the next day, just screws her courage up and walks into the pale room as the sun’s dawning and he’s alone, staring out the window with eyes half-asleep.

“Where’s Camille?” she asks, and it’s not the first set of words she’s meant to come out of her mouth, but he grins at her, mouth crooked and sleepy.

“Sent her home.  She needs the rest.”

“Your flat?” Bel asks.  He nods. 

“’M not much for company today, Moneypenny,” he tells her, and he’s slurring—tired and drugged.  She pets his hair and kisses at his hairline, lets him tip his face up until she’s kissing at the bandage across the bridge of his broken nose, the corner of his battered mouth.

“That’s alright, James,” she tells him back, strokes her fingers through his hair, presses her lips to his again and stands to leave.  “Be good.”

“Always,” says the faint lump in the covers.

Camille’s legs are no less shocking than they were the first time she saw them, but her face is warmer; they each know who the other is now, and it’s the knowing that takes the venom out of them—the knowing and the fondness, this strange familiarity born of sitting over their mutual lover in his sickbed.  Camille brushes her kiss past Bel’s cheeks in the continental manner; she smells of violets and coffee.

“Come in.”

Their bed is a lovenest on the floor.  Camille leads her past without shyness, guides her to the little table in the kitchen and is already pouring her a cup of the strong black coffee she prefers before Bel has a chance to politely decline.  She takes the flowers when Bel offers, arranges them prettily in a milk jug, and leans against the counterpane, watching.

“You look exhausted,” Bel says.  She winces, but Camille just hums, nodding in agreement.

“You do, too.”

“I can’t sleep.”  The confession is soft, winded.  Camille’s laugh is, too.

“Neither can I.”  They finish their coffee in silence; Camille disappears for a moment and reappears, one of Freddie’s shirts slung over her arm—pale winter blue, Bel’s favorite, and she wonders how she knew.  “Come.”

And it’s strange to see her suit folded neatly over the back of the only chair in the bedroom, to slot her body into their marital bed and bring her nose to Camille’s throat, sexless though their legs intertwine and they’re both wearing his clothes, both pretending he’s between them, but when they sleep they sleep deep and dozy and she wakes to the smell of dinner, chicken and wine.  They visit him together and he sleeps, and then they go home and they do.

“I hated you the moment I first saw you,” Bel whispers to Camille’s shoulder.

“I hated you more.”

Camille comes to work with her, translates for Lix, follows her through the office nursing a cup of tea like a glass of scotch and laughs too loud at jokes but sits at his desk to touch the photos hanging up.  They visit him together again; Bel leaves them alone and comes back to awkward silence, to waiting, to expectant eyes on her, but she doesn’t know what they want.  Camille leaves for a moment, but she just holds Freddie’s hand wordlessly and lets him kiss her knuckles.

“I walked to the end of the hall today,” he says when Camille comes back.  “And I didn’t lose my breath.”

Bel feels irrationally proud for him.  Her grin is reflected on Camille’s face.

“I told him to do something,” Camille tells her later.  Her hair tickles at Bel’s face.

“I did, too.”

“He’s so stupid sometimes,” Camille complains.

“He is.”  Bel tucks Camille’s face against her shoulder.

The day he comes home, the entire office comes out to see him.  Isaac films it, stock footage of the heroic journalist welcomed home after his trials; Freddie frowns to see the camera from his seat in the wheelchair but puts on a smile when he sees Bel and Camille, their hands coming down to grip his own.  His hand feels strong in hers, Bel thinks, bones just beneath the skin but sturdy.  Hector and Marnie chat easily in the car's front seat and the three of them are wedged together in the back because they can’t let go of each other.  She can’t let go of them.

It’s only a little bit embarrassing how many of her suits have made their way over, pressed between Camille’s floral silks and his neat boiled wool.  She helps Camille settle him in, eases the thick blankets over his legs because it’s still rather chilly for the time of year, and stands back with a smile.  Camille watches her from the edge of the bed; Freddie curls his fingers around his wife’s and doesn’t look away from Bel’s face.

“I’ll come collect my things tomorrow, okay?  Give you some time to settle in,” she offers.

“Bel.”  It’s Camille who says it.  Who stops her.  Freddie watches, shuffles over to make room.

The shirt she’s borrowed is still over the back of the chair where she left it this morning; it’s strange to see her suit hanging on the back of the chair with his.  Camille’s fingers lock with hers, and beneath their palms she can feel his heartbeat, can hear the familiar sound of Camille’s breath.  They sleep.


End file.
